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New details have come to light about the Neiman Marcus security
breach, revealing that over 1.1 million consumers may have been
victimized by a scheme that appears strikingly similar to the
attack that besieged as many as 100 million Target shoppers last
month.

Investigators have not revealed if the same cybercriminals are suspected in the
Neiman Marcus breach as the loose band of Eastern European
hackers suspected in Target's theft, reports The New York
Times. However, "security specialists working with the
authorities have said that the hackers were considering
several major retailers as potential targets."

In both cases, RAM-scraping malware appears to have been
installed on point-of-sale terminals using a Trojan tool in an
operation that investigators are calling Kaptoxa, reports
Wired. "The code is based on a previous malicious
tool known as BlackPOS that is believed to have been developed
in 2013 in Russia."

In an apology on Neiman Marcus's website, president and CEO Karen
Katz disclosed that hackers attempted to "scrape" credit card
data last year between July 16 and Oct. 30. To date,
approximately 2,400 cards had been used fraudulently, she
said.

However, Katz assured that no Social Security numbers or birth
dates were comprised; no Neiman Marcus or Bergdorf Goodman cards
had been used fraudulently; online shoppers were not affected;
and PINs were not at risk. Like Target, Neiman Marcus will offer
one year of free credit monitoring and identity-theft protection
to anybody who shopped with the store in the last year.

According to the Times, this rash of breaches has
reignited discussion that the U.S. should adopt the same EMV
credit card technology that is pervasive throughout the rest of
the world, in which cards have a small chip that generates a new
code for every transaction.

The only hitch is, "retailers and card issuers have worried that
the cost of adopting the technology, usually estimated at $15
billion to $30 billion, would be more than the cost of the fraud
it prevented."